


Heavy in your arms

by Lilly_White



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-03
Updated: 2016-05-03
Packaged: 2018-06-06 04:34:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6738403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilly_White/pseuds/Lilly_White
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are different phases of grief. But when your first love got you shot in the heart and made you take a 30-year retrospective nap, grief gets complicated.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heavy in your arms

It isn’t a corpse. At least, not exactly.

Somehow he can’t remember what it was like when her skin was warm. He looks up at her from where he sits in the dark and damp, eyes following the will-o-wisps that ricochet from crystal facets to dark water. The blue lights flicker over the folds of his cloak, sliding across the humidity of his eyes, catching in the corners. The tears have long since become inappropriate.

He does not love her.

His eyes travel down the length of her throat, and as he reminds himself of her perfume, it’s only a vague notion; a white scent emanating from her skin like cold emanating from ice. He can almost imagine it; water trickling down her skin, freezing to outline the delicate blue of her veins. An invisible ripple like heat undulating over her flesh. He doesn't remember when that bosom wasn't hollow; to him, there is a kind of mute poetry in the silence of a loved one’s body, a kind of reverence. Without the pulse, without the warmth, he is saved from the emotion, the ravages of the living and their reciprocity.

In his memory, her fingertips are like icicles, her flesh as cold as the earth. He remembers the quicksilver outline of her lips, the furtive feeling of them and how impossible it was to recall the exact pressure, the exact choreography, in the second after breaking it off. In his memory her mouth had an indigo taint, the old image of her face mutated by what he has had before him for the last 30 years. 

He’s not sure if he wants to remember how it was when her fingers were pink and plump, her lips like sheared peppers and her heart breaking the rhythm of his own. He’s not sure if it’s fear or indifference. He has gone so long with only half a care, half a mind, half a hurt. He’s not sure if he can take the realization that it used to be good, that it used to be alive.

He’s tried bringing up the past but every time he does there are strange stings all over his ribs, as though those faerie lights were settling there. He fancies he can feel her disappointment when he gives up.

So long he’s sat there, looking up, in wistful non-remembrance. So long he’s contemplated her without admitting to himself that once, it wasn’t this cold, it wasn’t this respectful. He adores her, worships her almost. But it’s not love. It’s not love.

Thankfully, it’s not love.

-

So when there passes a violent, crashing reflection over the crystal that cages her eyes, her still heart could have quivered – when crimson leaks into the peaceful, translucent black – when the glass stalagmites shatter under the rage of relentless expression, she could’ve almost smiled. The man on the other side of the crystal had finally lived. The man on the other side had bled again, had felt again, had reconstructed his own humanity.

She watches with closed eyes as he slumps to the side of her erect form, leather squeaking over the ice as he drags his hands down the hard, glittering layers covering the curves of her hips.

He’s remembering. He’s forcing himself to remember. Too often had reminders of her existence come to claw at his numbness during his journey; he wants to exorcise it, to live through it in order to cast it away more thoroughly than ever. He doesn’t want to love her. It’s the last thing he wants.

But as he lifts his dry eyes to her waist, to the light bumps of her hipbones beneath the fabric, distorted by the crooked facets; images of what she could’ve looked like the sunlight suggest themselves to his imagination, and he shakes his head. His mind is still filled with the atrocities he’s wreaked, the blood, the chase, the smoke of gunfire, and somehow she blends into it all – it’s too much life, too much violence, too much authenticity. Red spatters over the pallor of her mouth and he relates her touch to the stroke of countless daggers that should’ve scarred his alien skin – he who used to live in the void, related her to it, and so could not suffer. But he has lived again, and her voice returns to him in strange accents – her lips crack at the corners, and the violence of her heartbeat is a distant echo, rebounding in the darkness of the cave, making ripples in the water.

He knows that if he looks at her hands, they will imprison him, wrap around his throat and force themselves into his imagination, his distant memory. They will paint colours where only safe neutrality has reigned since they had each been buried alive. And he doesn’t want that. He doesn’t – doesn’t want-

He can’t help it. He looks up.

In his mind he cannot imagine her touch. He can only visualize her as she was, as though their entwined bodies were made of smoke and shadow. Darkness twists in a play of light over the venerable rigidity of ice, and he finally knows, he sees her as she was. The tears follow the path that her fingertips used to trace, and her hands become supple as his fingers come to catch them – her forearms lose their icy sheen as he lets his hands travel over her skin, and he can feel the shadow of pressure across his back as she holds him to her. He remembers how their hips would kiss, how the balls of her feet would slide down the back of his legs – he remembers how she’d squirm when those delicate fingers disappeared into his mouth, how his teeth used to scrape over fine phalanges. He can’t recall what she sounded like when speaking normally, but the sound of her on the edge of abandon is almost too easy – such expression was tied to his own pride of course, but also something else, something she would titillate upon breathing into his ear, _I love you, don’t stop, never stop._

It was only once and yet it fills his mind so vividly that it’s all he can remember; everything else, all the conversations, meals, work, projects, moments of shared joy – they’re all in a jumble in his mind, and he doesn’t seem to care for the details, or to have cared. He can’t remember what she looked like when she laughed but he can almost feel her grip on him when she would have to leave; the desire to melt their bodies into one, to overcome that last shred of lonely independence they were each subjugated to. He hadn’t cared that he loved her too much. He hadn’t cared that it might’ve been a bad idea to give so much. He hadn’t cared that nobody could lose so much without going insane.

He lets rip a feral yell and smashes the glittering crystals with the butt of his Cerberus, again and again – crimson waves fall from his shoulder as he throws himself at her effigy, never relenting until the air bites her naked skin just one last time. Every shard of crystal smashing into a thousand pieces at his feet is like the undoing of her silence, the undoing of her immobility, the undoing of the distance that has separated them for so long. He doesn’t know what he believes, that if maybe he could touch her again he could finally recall what her skin truly felt like against him, the texture of it, from her scratchy palms and cheeks to the tender spots in the hollows of her hips, the insides of her thighs. And that perhaps, if he could recall that, he would no longer feel like she was purposefully hiding from him, stealing the memory from him in desperate accusation . He who had been satisfied to imagine her kiss as an insubstantial breath of tenderness – now there’s this thirst, an impossible craving for the old knowledge, the old privilege of enjoying her body as she’d enjoyed his. He can’t enjoy shadows and smoke. He won’t be satisfied by anything less than total possession of her memory- he’ll tear it from her if he must. They had once forged themselves together in the heat of ecstasy, bone melting into bone; it was inhuman to let him wander with half a body, half a memory. He won’t have it. He won’t. 

His gun smashes through the crystal where her hand is – soon, soon he’ll remember, soon he’ll be able to recall her as he desperately seeks to. The tinkling of a thousand shards reverberates through the cave as he carries on even after he’s smashed through the space where her hand should’ve been. He smashes and smashes, ignoring the blades of crystal that plummet only to reveal more translucent blue instead of where her arm should be.

“No,” he growls when his reason tries to overstep his obsession. He breaks through the centre, ripping through the space her torso had occupied – her hips disappear under his hammering blows, and her legs fall apart as long shards detach themselves in splintering cracks. He’s attacked the centre and base – inevitably, as he goes on without letting himself realize it had only been an apparition, a reflection, a figment of his imagination … the whole structure collapses, as though in slow motion, showering him in white and blue slithers.

He doesn’t seem to care that it should’ve been soft, smooth skin and not these cold, jagged edges – his intent doesn’t seem to change as he revels in the cold, dropping to his knees among the ice and pressing the biggest pieces against his chest in a mismatched jigsaw. 

-

It isn’t a corpse that he holds against him. At least, not exactly. It’s the dead weight of what could’ve been, of what he should break away from. But he doesn’t care. To him, the shards are smooth and burning hot – and the wetness that breaks over his lips as the ice begins to melt is like a bittersweet reminder, that the kisses of the dead are never fleeting.


End file.
